Introducing the Relational Mapping Toolkit

From Stakeholder Mapping to Asset Mapping to Outcome Mapping, every sector has its terminology and to an outside eye it’s hard to know whether they are just different terms for similar things or actually very different things.

Given the amount of mapping terms flying around, we thought we should make the name of ours as clearly descriptive as possible ??

The Relational Mapping Toolkit, at its heart, maps relationships between humans in a community of practice (or a community of interest, or a community of place- take your pick) and how those relationships structure themselves around purpose, or intention, or working methods ?(the list is infinite, really). ?

Our Toolkit is actually a technology with a wraparound service to facilitate the making of the map. ?We work with the client who pulls together the initial invite list, and then we facilitate the workshop, taking everyone through a simple and short set of questions that generate the map in real time- ?the relationships, the interdependencies, the boundaries. ?Everything from the data model to the login methods to the displays are designed around this being a moment of collective sensemaking, with the immediate visual feedback of the network map springing to life as everyone answers the questions together. ?

And once made, our maps can be used to understand all sorts of things. ?A community can use its map to understand how people coalesce around shared purposes or services; where those shared purposes are under- or over-resourced; where the potential is for collaboration; how to link in those on the margins; how to best resource the community, and where that resourcing is going beyond its immediate recipients. ?They can even be used to build impact, when the map is designed and explored through a stakeholder mapping lens (more on that in a later blog post).

The trick is in designing the data model and the visualisation so that you can see and track the community behaviours that no amount of spreadsheets could do for you.

When someone wants a relational map made of their community, we ask lots of questions about what the community convenes around, what its current behaviours are, and what they want the map to show. ?Once we’ve heard the answers we build the question set, and figure out what the map should display and how (i.e what should be a node, what should be a filter box, and so on).

So we spend a lot of time entering dummy data and staring at node maps. ?

Here we are in the middle of figuring out how on earth we build a meaningful map of a community that is full of academics from many different departments across 4 different universities:

Those academics are in rich knowledge exchange with each other, but also with small businesses, freelancers and artists in the same community who need to be visualised with an organisation if they have one.

We also want to be looking at impact in terms of how weak ties at the start of the programme have moved to strong ties by the end, both within the team and into the organisations working for a better future in the place we are working in.

Once we get this right we’ll run the workshop, and once everyone has mapped, we’ll be helping everyone explore the map using the filter boxes on the right.

With this being a new tool, we are doing a round of baseline maps for various universities and creative communities, and are looking forward to mapping again later in the year so that we can start to look at how these maps evolve over time, and what that tells us about collaboration, the movement of resources, and how people share power and knowledge.

For more info or to sign up to occasional updates, go to www.relationalmapping.co.uk